Benefits of Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration for Effective Public Health Messaging (50m Lecture)

This talk would summarize an ongoing initiative by the Water Research Foundation (www.waterrf.org) to broaden the national dialogue on water quality contaminants and public health. Co-authors of this presentation would include the Water Research Foundation, ReInventing the Nation’s Urban Water Infrastructure (ReNUWIt), ARCADIS, and potentially other organizations who participated in the workshop.

Many Water Research Foundation subscribers are drinking water utilities who field requests from the public about their water quality, often driven by media coverage. Water utility staff who respond to these questions may lack the public health knowledge and credentials to provide a satisfactory answer to these questions. Similarly, local county and state public health agencies may get requests from the public and from the news media and may lack the context or knowledge of the local water system to provide complete and relevant information. Both groups can benefit from shared resources, at either a local or national level, resulting in more consistent messaging to the general public, and can benefit from connections with public health researchers on “hot topics” or areas of emerging research.

We propose to describe a few examples of important issues pertaining to water quality and public health that have prompted public concern and questions, to illustrate the benefits of knowledge sharing between different disciplines. Examples include:

1. Media coverage of lead leaching from piping in people’s homes into the drinking water supply due to changes in water chemistry, a result of the local water utility (Washington DC) changing the type of chlorine disinfection used.
2. The detection of compounds that are commonly found in wastewater (e.g., caffeine, pharmaceuticals, personal care products) in drinking water source waters, as a result of direct or indirect wastewater reuse (Multiple locations nationwide, covered by Associated Press several years ago).
3. Concerns about water quality from private wells in rural or remote areas where septic systems may adversely affect shallow groundwater quality (e.g., Cape Cod, Massachusetts)

Next, we would describe the Water Research Foundation initiative to broaden the national dialuge and build collaborations between water and public health groups, summarize discussion topics and key perspectives from different organizations/participants at a recent 2-day workshop, and provide examples of ongoing efforts and intiatives to improve relationships and collaborations among existing programs and generate more effective and consistent messages. (For example, workshop participant Dr. Jerome Paulson described an existing network of Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Units (PEHSUs) whose mission and efforts could be leveraged to better respond to questions from the public related to the health effects of environmental issues on children).